It took 100 years for Egypt to reunify and thereby bring to an end a century of political and social chaos known as the First Intermediary Period.

UNESCO: Learning from ancient droughts

The Turks, for their part, insisted that they had made good-faith efforts to achieve a peace settlement (they and their ethnic kin in Cyprus had accepted a UN-sponsored plan to reunify the island but it was spurned by the Greek-Cypriots earlier this year).

ECONOMIST: A date with Turkey | The